@revisesociology I hear so many stories like this. Either liquidations or failure to commercialise. In the UK we are wonderful at innovation and creativity and early design. On the flip side we are pretty hopeless at "scaling" and "commercialising". The role of gov in seed or scale-financing innovation is a moot point. Sometimes it works.
Is it better than incubators/accelerators? Probably not (e.g. chat-GPT came out of Y-combinator in Sanfrancisco.
Is it better at sustainability when compared to organic growth (non equity or debt financed growth)? Probably not.
Do Government funded projects occasionally produce moon-shots that can change things? Occasionally e.g. CERN gave us Tim Berners-Lee and the WWW. DARPA in the US gave us TCP/IP and the Internet.
But in all the above they didn't give us Linux / Blockchain or Open source - perhaps the p2p economy needs to be credited more for truly good stuff.
BTW a UKCouncil CEO Once told me: "Innovate UK. You would be better to talk all their funding money. Dig a very large hole. A pour concrete over it. Most of that funding does more harm than good.
Having received a few million of funding from them over the years - I think he actually has a point!
Warmest!
I'm not entirely sold on the virtues of government funding, you make some fair points!
We may well just be better off without them!